Is India's lack of toilets a cultural problem?

www.bbc.com   May 30th, 2014

India needs to extend sanitation facilities

Is anybody really surprised that nearly half of India's 1.2 billion people have no toilet at home?

Not really. The India Human Development report has been saying this for a while. The situation is worse in the villages, where two-thirds of the homes don't have toilets. Open defecation is rife, and remains a major impediment in achieving millennium development goals which include reducing by half the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015.

Is the lack of toilets and preference for open defecation a cultural issue in a society where the habit actually perpetuates social oppression, as proved by the reduced but continued existence of low caste human scavengers and sweepers?

It would seem so.

Mahatma Gandhi, India's greatest leader, had, in the words of a biographer, a "Tolstoyian preoccupation with sanitation and cleaning of toilets". Once he inspected toilets in the city of Rajkot in Gujarat. He reported that they were "dark and stinking and reeking with filth and worms" in the homes of the wealthy and in a Hindu temple. The homes of the untouchables simply had no toilets. "Latrines are for you big people," an untouchable told Gandhi.

Many years later when Gandhi began encouraging his disciples to work as sanitation officers and scavengers in villages, his diligent secretary and diarist Madhav Desai noted the attitudes of villagers. "They don't have any feeling at all," he wrote. "It will not be surprising if within a few days they start believing that we are their scavengers."

India's enduring shame is clearly rooted in cultural attitudes. More than half a century after Independence, many Indians continue to relieve themselves in the open and litter unhesitatingly, but keep their homes spotlessly clean. Yes, the state has failed to extend sanitation facilities, but people must also take the blame.

In the upstart suburb of Gurgaon, where I live, my educated, upwardly mobile, rich neighbours sent their pet dogs outside with their servants to defecate and refuse to clean up the mess. As long as their condominium is clean, it is all right. These are the same people who believe that the government is at the root of all evil.

Campaigns

Things are getting better in the villages, however slowly. Only 40% had access to sanitation facilities in 2002. This increased to 51% in 2008-009. More than 60% of homes in Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand states were still without toilets. There are other interesting behavioural and cultural pointers: Sikh and Christian households had the highest - over 70% - access to improved sanitation. Hindus - at 45% - had the least access.

India provides subsidies to construct toilets and runs sanitation and hygiene campaigns. Federal spending on sanitation was increased nearly three-fold in 2005. In 2003, the government kicked off a scheme to award village councils which are able to eliminate open defecation. Kerala has been the best performer with 87% of its village councils picking up the award. Only 2% of councils in dirt-poor Bihar won in a dismal commentary on the state of its sanitation.

India could take the lead from the tiny states of Himachal Pradesh and Haryana. Both have used and empowered local people to tackle open defecation, build toilets and adopt good waste management. Haryana provides subsidies to poor households to build toilets, and enlists women to run campaigns in what is a largely patriarchal and less progressive state. Volunteers visit homes, encouraging people to built toilets. All homes in Himachal Pradesh have a toilet today, say government surveys. The plan is to get rid of open defecation by the end of this year.

But until the time its people get rid of curious - and skewed - cultural attitudes to community sanitation and hygiene, India will never have enough toilets.

More men among toilet-sceptics in India

• By Rukmini S, www.thehindu.com
• View Original
• May 9th, 2014

 

The Hindu Not having a toilet remains the major problem in sanitation. File Photo Photo by: The Hindu

The figure for households without toilets is 47 per cent for Hindu households as against 31 per cent for Muslims and 16 per cent for Christians and Sikhs, according to NSS data.

Extensive new evidence shows that building toilets alone will not eliminate open defecation in India as not everyone who has access to toilet, especially men, believe that it’s important to use it.

Not having a toilet remains the major problem in sanitation: 60 per cent of rural households and just under 10 per cent of urban households in India do not have access to a toilet, according to new official data from the 68th round of the National Sample Survey (NSS) data. But even among households with access to toilets, some open defecation exists. According to NSS data, two per cent of rural households with access to toilets do not use them. However, researchers Diane Coffey, Aashish Gupta et al of the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (RICE) found that 7 per cent of households with access to a toilet were not using them. When they looked at households where at least one family member was not using the toilet, the number swelled to 18 per cent.

This number is being driven up by men, who, in all three surveys, reported lower toilet use than women. “I built the toilet for my youngest daughter-in-law not to feel shame. But I go to the fields – it’s much healthier going there,” Ramavatar, a marginal farmer in Uttar Pradesh’s Fatehpur district, told The Hindu earlier this summer. Such “personal preference” is overwhelmingly the most common reason for not using toilets despite access seen in both NSS and RICE data.

Use of toilets lags among Hindu households. Both access to toilets, and the actual use of the toilet, lags among Hindu households. The figure for households without toilets is 47 per cent for Hindu households as against 31 per cent for Muslims and 16 per cent for Christians and Sikhs, NSS data shows. Among Hindus, Scheduled Tribes, Scheduled Castes and then OBCs have lower access to toilets. A similar pattern exists for the actual use of toilets among religious groups.

Arghyam, a Bangalore-based water and sanitation group, reported similar data in a study of 45 Gram panchayats in Davangere, Karnataka: while half the households had toilets, over a third of those households reported that at least one family member did not use the toilet.

The government is aware of this issue. “We are convinced there are two elements to eliminate open defecation — building toilets, and creating the awareness about of using them,” Sandhya Singh, Joint Director of Nirmal Bharat Abhiyaan, the flagship sanitation scheme for rural areas, told The Hindu.

Class divide : But despite the existence of a national campaign to build subsidized toilets for rural Indians since as far back as 1986, a toilet remains something that money buys. Access to toilet rises systematically by class, the NSSO data shows. The 68th round of the National Sample Survey (NSS) data focused on access to toilets and the use of toilets among a nationally representative sample of over 1 lakh households between 2011 and 2012 data for which was recently made public.

Nearly 80 per cent of all the households with toilets that were surveyed, had constructed their toilets purely with private funds, Dean Spears, health economist with the Delhi School of Economics and Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (RICE), said. Diane Coffey, Aashish Gupta et al of RICE surveyed 3,200 households over five States.

As a result, Mr. Spears and his colleagues have been arguing for cheaper, more basic toilets of the sort widely used in Bangladesh to be promoted in rural India. Arghyam’s research has shown that people widely believe that toilet pits will fill up quickly, and find the thought of cleaning this waste distasteful. “Explaining to people how toilet pits work and offering them solutions for emptying pits should alleviate this,” Radhika Viswanathan, project officer at Arghyam, explained in an email. “Cleaning materials that are easy-to-use and make the job simple will help,” she added.

India tops in open defecation

www.thehindu.com  May 9th, 2014

India still has the largest number of people defecating in open in the world, according to a new UN report prompting the Government to admit it as a “huge shame….Globally, India continues to be the country with the highest number of people (597 million people) practising open defecation,” says the report — the Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation — 2014 update — released in Geneva on Friday.

The report jointly prepared by the WHO and the UNICEF says that eighty-two per cent of the one billion people are practising open defecation in the world live in just 10 countries. Despite having some of the highest numbers of open defecators, India does not feature among the countries making great strides in reducing open defecation, says the report. The UN findings prompted Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh to term it as “a huge shame for all of us. I have been saying all this for three years now. Sanitation has to become a national obsession. It is a huge shame for all of us,” said Mr. Ramesh, who took several steps to eradicate the menace of open defecation in the country. “High GDP growth is all very well but this is most basic fundamental, related to the security and dignity of women. Also we have failed to recognise that poor sanitation is one of the main causes of persistent malnutrition,” he told PTI.

The report, however, hails India’s immediate neighbour Bangladesh and Vietnam, saying they are among the top 10 countries that have achieved the highest reduction in open defecation since 1990. Vietnam, Bangladesh and Peru have reduced open defecation prevalence to single digits, it says.

According to the UN, countries where open defecation is most widely practised have the highest number of deaths of children under the age of five, as well as high levels of under-nutrition, high levels of poverty and large disparities between the rich and poor. There are also strong gender impacts: lack of safe, private toilets makes women and girls vulnerable to violence and is an impediment to girls’ education, it says.